Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don't Want You to Vote

[G_j]

http://www.alternet.org/story/56957

Bush Government to Poor Voters: We Don't Want You to Vote

By Steven Rosenfeld, AlterNet. Posted July 17, 2007.

The Justice Department is pressuring 10 states to purge their voter rolls, while states are ignoring laws to help low-income Americans register to vote. State welfare offices across the country are not offering millions of low-income Americans the opportunity to register to vote when applying for public assistance despite a federal law requiring them to do so, according to an analysis of a recent federal voting registration report and experts who say the Department of Justice and states are to blame.

"It's huge. It's another area where the administration is failing us," said Donna Brazile, chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, speaking of the Department of Justice's oversight of the nation's voter registration laws. "They are not pushing states to recognize their voter registration responsibilities."

At the same time, the Justice Department's Voting Section, which enforces voting rights and supervises elections in some states, is pressuring 10 states to do more to purge voter rolls -- or remove ineligible voters -- before the 2008 presidential election, according to letters sent to state election officials this spring.

"We conducted an analysis of each state's total voter registration numbers as a percentage of citizen voting age population," wrote John Tanner, the Department of Justice Voting Section chief, in an April 18, 2007, letter to North Carolina's top election official. "We write now to assess the changes in your voter registration list ... and the subsequent removal of persons no longer eligible to vote."

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[bluestateguy]

1. A lot of conservatives quietly favor property qualifications for voting

They don't talk about it much, or push for it very hard, but if you get a conservative in a moment of unguarded honesty he or she may very well tell you that they'd be just fine with going back to the 18th/early 19th century practice of a property qualification for voting.

[MagickMuffin]

2. I posted this earlier today

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=1354147&mesg_id=1354147